Out of chaos comes a human desire for order. A desire that runs so deep we don’t give it a second thought, it just is. It preoccupied and controls us.

We can try to adapt our behaviour to weave our lives through it, or we can stay on the path mapped out in front of us, following the accepted norm, the familiar. But if you keep looking, let yourself be curious, and keep exploring you can open your eyes to a whole world inspired by the landscape that hasn’t yet been moderated by others.

I do like the order of straight lines seldom found in nature. I will always look for an avenue, a manmade vista, a focal point, somewhere for the eye to linger, to tempt the viewer to explore. I do love planning a seating area with paving stones that have crisp clean edges and bold architectural lines, the perfect foil to some happy planting. I enjoy organizing my curated objects into repeating patterns and colourways. I want the space in front of our home to be ordered. Neat. Somewhere for the postman to turn around in his van. A place to park the car and make it to the front door effortlessly without ending up in the Taxus hedge.

But I challenge myself to be inquisitive and stay curious, to retain and embrace that creative part of me that hasn’t been completely tamed by society’s rules.
I don’t want to have to follow a preconceived notion, an unquestionable routine. I like to think I listen to the rules and then make my own decisions. Not on the rules that keep us safe or the ones that without it would be impossible to live alongside others peacefully, or keep the roof over our heads, but the ones that are subjective and open to interpretation. The ones that are designed to keep us all blindly on one path in the same direction.
I want to have the quiet confidence to say to myself that it doesn’t matter so much that I couldn’t get the jumbled letters in my spelling tests at school to un-jumble and always came bottom of class, that I still can’t retain French verbs or dates in history and being able to recite times tables is just a non-starter.

But the visual jumble of thoughts I do have and the way I seem to see the world can lead to creative moments. By finally letting myself believe that creatively can be a ‘thing’ the doors of unthinkable possibilities have opened to me that this, it would seem can be of as much value and worth to a world whose natural beauty sometimes seems to be wearing a heavy beil of smog, as being able to do the latest mathematical puzzle at an impressive speed.